a window's life
As I washed our front room window today thoughts of the past owners of this house clogged my mind. The front room window is not original to the house. It is an expansive and boring piece of insulated glass which can't be opened. Spraying windex and smearing it around got me thinking though. I moved to another window which is much older. I doubt it is original to the house (1875) but it it is quite wavy and distorts the view of outside, so it's old enough to be called old.
I wonder who else has washed this window, or the glass previous. It is easy to guess that most of the window frames are original just by seeing the state of them. As hard as it is to open these drafty windows it would be a shame to ever replace them. It has always given me a shivering sensation when I think about people from that long ago walking up the same stairs or tinkering in the basement. It's not as though this was all that long ago. I know our toddler aged country has old homes that have far less memories to carry than other places. It still gives me inquisitive willies. Did other little kids leave fingerprints on these windows? What kinds of tragedies did these people endure? What was the original floor plan like? Where the heck was the kitchen, because I know it had to be bigger than the current one on the first-floor level??
Maybe I have been thinking about it more because I need to give city hall a call and ask about the abstract for the property, which we still haven't received. This will give us most of the ownership information since the property was developed. The only thing we know about the original piece of land is that it was a farm, and it covered a few of the present day lots which now hold houses of their own.
Better finish washing some more of Abel's imprints off, before he wakes.
I wonder who else has washed this window, or the glass previous. It is easy to guess that most of the window frames are original just by seeing the state of them. As hard as it is to open these drafty windows it would be a shame to ever replace them. It has always given me a shivering sensation when I think about people from that long ago walking up the same stairs or tinkering in the basement. It's not as though this was all that long ago. I know our toddler aged country has old homes that have far less memories to carry than other places. It still gives me inquisitive willies. Did other little kids leave fingerprints on these windows? What kinds of tragedies did these people endure? What was the original floor plan like? Where the heck was the kitchen, because I know it had to be bigger than the current one on the first-floor level??
Maybe I have been thinking about it more because I need to give city hall a call and ask about the abstract for the property, which we still haven't received. This will give us most of the ownership information since the property was developed. The only thing we know about the original piece of land is that it was a farm, and it covered a few of the present day lots which now hold houses of their own.
Better finish washing some more of Abel's imprints off, before he wakes.
posted by Tracey at 10:55 AM
1 Comments:
I have a book that my father gave me--about 150 years old. I've wondered similar things about it. I wish it could talk and tell me what it has seen. If you look close, you can see places where people wrote names and little poems in it, though they are hard to read.
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